Send smart transactional emails with Campaign Monitor and Zapier

Here at Campaign Monitor, we’re both fans and users of Zapier: it’s an awesome tool which makes it super easy to connect your most-used web applications to Campaign Monitor without any coding skills needed. To set up a “Zap”, which is what Zapier calls their integration connections, you simply select the tool you want to connect, and then the action and the trigger.

How Zapier works with Campaign Monitor

Zapier facilitates connections between Campaign Monitor and 400+ other awesome online software products. That’s why it was a total no-brainer to integrate our new transactional email tools with Zapier as well. You probably receive tons of system-triggered, transactional emails from apps and websites every month: password resets, order confirmations, and membership notifications are just a few examples. They contain some of the most important information that you and your customers receive and are opened 8x more than traditional marketing emails.

Historically, these emails have been generated without much of your input—they don’t always match your branding, they don’t always include the niceties that you might like to use with your customers. Now, you can create, edit and optimize these customer communications right inside Campaign Monitor and then send them based on actions of your choice using Zapier.

Starter Zaps you can use

Here are a few examples of Zaps you could send to get started:

BigCommerce

BigCommerce, like their name suggests, is one of the biggest eCommerce and shopping cart software out there. Their easy-to-use site builder and intuitive user interface make them a great choice for people looking to make simple, clean online stores.

Say, for example, that you are using a BigCommerce store to sell your fresh, cold-pressed juice. On each sale, you’d like to send a customized email to your new customer confirming their purchase, and recommend some other products from your store that they might be interested in. Now you can do this with little-to-no effort and without touching any code. Set up the smart transactional email template in your Campaign Monitor account following the steps here, and make sure to set up any email variables that you would like to include to customize your email. Email variables allow you to input information pulled from BigCommerce and dynamically enter it into the email sent to your customer. Then, set up the Zap with the trigger from BigCommerce set to “New Order” and your action set to Campaign Monitor’s “Send Smart Transactional Email.” Once you’ve set up the Zap, you’ll never have to touch it again—unless of course you want to change up the design or information included within. In that case, just head on back into Campaign Monitor and use our email builder to make whatever changes you would like. It’ll automatically apply next time the Zap is triggered.

Eventbrite

Tons of companies are using Eventbrite to get a better handle on registration, attendee management and ticketing for their events. The one thing that many people don’t use it for, though, is designing beautiful email campaigns. Use Campaign Monitor’s smart transactional email builder to create an on-brand email to send out to your customers after they’ve registered for your event. You can customize the email with a bounty of customer information provided from EventBrite. For example, include the barcode someone should scan as their ticket to the event, their status, their team name, or even the event description.

To get started, create the smart email template in your Campaign Monitor account, including all of the email parameters that you would like to have replaced with customer information from EventBrite. Then, head on over to Zapier and set up the Zap from EventBrite’s “New Attendee” trigger and Campaign Monitor’s “Send Smart Transactional Email” action. When you set up the Zap, you can specifically match up email parameters along with whether you would only like to send these specific emails to people attending a certain event or all of your events moving forward.

Breezy HR

Human resources and hiring are two things that most companies can’t do without and are always trying to get better at. Making a stellar experience for your prospective employees can give them a great taste of what it will be like to work for your company for real. Now, instead of a plain-text “We’ve got your application” response, try sending a transactional email that matches your brand and offers a personal touch.

Create your custom-tailored template in Campaign Monitor, set up the Zap with the trigger of “New Candidate” and the action of “Send Smart Transactional Email,” then customize to your heart’s content. Thanks to custom field and email parameter mapping in Zapier, you can include personal touches such as: the candidate’s name, a timeline of when they can expect to receive a response or even some more information about the team that they are applying to work with in your first email.

Wrap up

No matter how you frame it, being able to easily trigger transactional emails with Zapier is super exciting. The opportunities are endless—if you can dream it, you can do it. We hope that these three examples have helped to fire up your creativity. Check out all the cool Zaps that you can use with Campaign Monitor here.

ok, there is nothing really new here… when can we expect the drip email functionality to be released on CM? this is a big feature for all of us and why it takes so long for CM to release it (ALL your competitors have it already).

Mercer Smith-Looper

Hey Max, thanks so much for your thoughts on this. I apologize if it seemed like we were trying to convey this as a new feature—we were just really excited that our transactional email functionality now works with Zapier! That being said, we are definitely interested in the behavioral email functionality that you are asking for, but don’t currently have a set timeline that we can share for it. You can bet your bottom dollar that the first place that you can find out is the blog, though, so definitely keep your eyes peeled here.